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Perfect cream finishing – automated.
Automated pastry finishing with machine vision and robotics
Filling and decorating small pastries with cream or fillings is craftsmanship – and at the same time a major challenge in everyday production. It requires experience, precision and a steady hand to ensure that every product is finished evenly – tray after tray, shift after shift.
Quality can vary depending on staff experience or daily workload. And as production volumes increase, manual finishing quickly becomes a bottleneck.
At Schäfer’s Backwaren GmbH in Berlin, robomotion automates exactly this step. The result: consistent quality across every batch. Schneebälle, cream puffs and éclairs are finished with the same precision every time.
To achieve this, robomotion developed a solution that seamlessly combines machine vision, dosing technology and quality inspection – scalable for both medium-sized bakery chains and large industrial bakeries.
Bakery industry / fine bakery products
Schäfer’s Backwaren GmbH
Robot with dosing technology for automated pastry finishing
Éclairs on conveyor before cream finishing
Precise cream application using robotic dosing technology
Finished pastries after automated finishing process
Even cream application on pastries
Cream puffs on baking tray before automated cream filling
Automated cream finishing process in operation
The robomotion solution combines quality assurance and automation in a single continuous process. For us, the key factor was flexibility – the system can easily adapt to different products.
Dr. Knut Köhler, Managing Director, Schäfer´s Produktionsgesellschaft mbH
The Challenge
Fine pastries. High expectations. Limited resources.
The goal was to automate the filling and decorating of small pastries with cream or fillings – directly on the baking tray. A task that consumes many hours each day and requires consistent precision.
As production volumes grow, this repetitive process quickly becomes a bottleneck.
The technical challenges were clear: pastries rarely lie perfectly aligned on the trays. Shape, spacing and position vary. To ensure accurate finishing, the system must first read each tray reliably before any filling is applied.
At the same time, strict hygiene standards apply in bakery production. The system comes into direct contact with cream and fillings and must therefore be easily accessible, simple to clean and suitable for continuous multi-shift operation.
Timing is another key factor. The dosing and filling equipment provided by Schäfer’s had to be integrated precisely. If movement and dosing are not perfectly synchronized, the result becomes immediately visible.
Finally, quality issues must be detected immediately. After finishing, defective products must be identified and removed automatically before entering the next production step.
The Solution
See. Dose. Inspect.
A clean and reproducible process – technically and hygienically.
robomotion automated one of the most time-critical steps in Schäfer’s bakery production: precise filling and finishing of pastries with cream or fillings.
The system uses two ABB IRB 360 Delta robots with camera-guided positioning. The dosing and filling technology itself was provided by Schäfer’s and integrated by robomotion into the automated process.
Step 1: See
A camera detects the exact position of each pastry on the incoming trays. Based on this information, the robot movements are calculated precisely – even when products are positioned differently.
Step 2: Dose
The start and stop of the customer-supplied dosing and filling system are triggered individually for each product and synchronized precisely with the robot motion.
• Schneebälle are filled using a needle
• Cream puffs and éclairs are finished from the bottom side
• For éclairs, the robot moves along a defined path during dosing to ensure even filling
Step 3: Inspect
After finishing, a second camera inspects each tray. Deviations are detected automatically and faulty trays are removed before entering the next production stage.
Currently, trays are manually loaded and unloaded. However, a fully automated unloading system from rack trolleys (Stikkenwagens) and automatic return of finished trays is already planned.
Hygiene as standard
The system is designed for easy accessibility and regular wet cleaning – food-safe, hygienic and compliant with audit requirements.
More than finishing
The base machine is designed as a flexible platform. Thanks to tray-based product supply and the adaptable robot technology, additional processes can also be implemented – such as dosing, filling, decorating, depositing, topping, marking or handling and quality control tasks.
Explore more solutions in our references.
Or learn more about our customer Schäfer’s and their bakery production.
